Slashworld Unlimited (Slash - Slash)

Member Name: dooeyyooey

Product:	Slash - Slash
Date:	31/07/09 (97 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Detailed. Full of anecdotes.

Disadvantages: Descriptive rather than reflective.

An autobiography written with Anthony Bozza and published at the end of 2007, this gives Slash's first hand account of his life, up until the date of publication of the book.

~ About Slash ~

Born Saul Hudson in London, England, Slash moved to Los Angeles as a child, and eventually became a guitar player, forming Guns N' Roses in the early 80s.
As the guitarist of Guns N' Roses and co-author of some of the best known and most successful rock songs ever written, Slash is arguably one of the best guitar players and certainly one of the most recognisables figures in rock.
Notorious for the outrageous lifestyle and behaviours that Guns N' Roses were known for, with this autobiography Slash attempts to give his official and definitive version of his life and career.


~ About Anthony Bozza ~

A journalist best known for his work at Rolling Stone magazine, by the time he collaborated with Slash he had already co-authored Eminem's and Tommy Lee's autobiographies.
He is responsible for weaving Slash's musings and recollections into the eloquent and coherent narrative of the book.


~ The autobiography ~

Slash's story begins in Hampstead, London, where he was born in 1965 to an Englishman and an African-American mother.
His father was an artist and his mother a costume designer.
After spending his early years living with his paternal grandparents in Stoke-on-Trent, his family moves to Los Angeles, where young Saul earns the nickname he will use throughout his life.
Given both his mother and father's laissez-faire approach to parenting, Slash's late childhood and early teens see him running loose all over town with his friends, where drugs and sex are easily available.
His proficiency as a BMX rider has him initially wanting to become a professional, until music and the guitar came along, and this new found passion took over.

He played in a few short-lived bands until joining Steven Adler, Duff McKagan, Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin and together forming Guns N' Roses.
Unsurprisingly, the greater part of the book is dedicated to chronicling the Guns N' Roses days: the band's incipience, creative process, business deals, life on the road, success, rivalries, internal fights and eventual disintegration.

Slash recounts with incredible detail, almost on a day-by-day basis the band's history: their chaotic shows and even more chaotic lifestyle, struggling to feed themselves, living in squalid, filthy conditions, getting into a variety of trouble for their ill-advised dalliances with women.

There is a never ending stream of anecdotes - some amusing, some cringing, plenty just downright shocking - about him, his bandmates and various other well-known figures in the entertainment world.

The book's content seems to be shared equally by three main themes - music, sex and drugs:

* Slash talks about his musical influences, and shares plenty of stories about his fellow musicians, those whom he admires and those he dismisses and is scornful of.

* His sexual proclivities (and those of his parents and friends) are recounted in detail, and this prodigious promiscuity and the band's habit of sharing their women provides some of the book's most memorable passages.

* His drug use and eventual descent into drug addiction and alcoholism are also meticulously documented.

Slash recalls how Guns N' Roses began unravelling due to the members' drug problems and Axl's unpredictable and antagonising behaviours.

After Slash finally leaves the band, the rest of the book concerns his subsequent projects (Slash's Snakepit and collaborations with various other artists), until he and Duff finally decide to start another venture together, the still existing Velvelt Revolver.

The final chapters see Slash finally dealing with the damage he has done to his body and making a concerted effort to keep himself sober, as well as settling down with one of his former groupies and becoming a father.

Slash's voice, filtered through Anthony Bozza's writing, is that of a congenial, mostly nice and surprisingly (given his stage persona) shy man, who himself acknowledges that he "could never be any kind of frontman".

His account is lively, often amusing and extremely detailed. So detailed in fact, that it has me wondering about its accuracy: Anyone who has ever known drug users will be aware that one of the many casualties of drugs is memory.
Not just because the chemicals severely affect the cognitive capacity to acquire and retain information, but also because in their intoxication, they are so caught up in their world that they care nothing about what is going on around them.
So just how Slash, who has been in an almost continuous drug haze since his teens is able to recall his entire life down to the dates, names, places, furnishings and conversations word for word, is anyone's guess. Mine is that he is either incredibly observant and in possession of a superhuman and indestructible memory, or that a lot of gaps have been filled in by his imagination.
Since it is such an engrossing account, I prefer to believe it is the former.

One of the factors that make the book a compelling read is Slash's openness.
He tells with remarkable straightforwardness of his struggles, successes, desires and dislikes.
He also does not shy away from recounting his (and other people's) embarrassing episodes.
The one time this candour falters is in relation to his second wife. He never goes into her shady life, other than saying that she was also a part of the groupie and drug scene, like him.
Such selective coyness after being so open about everyone else does not wash, and had it been about someone more prominent in the book it would have warranted my knocking a couple of stars off of my rating. But as it is someone who is absent and inconsequential up until the end, it does not matter.

As riveting as his story is, Slash's narrative is descriptive rather than analytic, and it possesses none of the introspection and soul-searching that Nikki Sixx's "THE HEROIN DIARIES" contains.
For someone who has seen so much and done so much, there is very little time given to reflection and exploration of causes, motives or consequences.
This is probably because, in his case, there are none to speak of: he is not a man carrying some deep, unresolved issue, and his indulgences are not desperate escapism but simply his cheerful embracing of what he considered "fun".

When he does pause to consider some of the unhealthy situations he has put himself in, his reflections are usually limited to one liners, and reveal contradictions and a sort of schoolboy ingenuousness:

- Several times he expresses his disgust at the state drugs have reduced his acquaintances - yet he eagerly tries every drug available, and lives continuously among drug addicts.
- At one point he meets a teenage girl "so whacked out that it broke [his] heart". This did not preclude him, of course, from making her one of his casual girlfriends - but then is greatly offended when her mother arrives and takes him for her daughter's enabler.
- Later on, his best friend dies of a drug overdose in his arms. When he attends the funeral, he is shocked to find out that his friend's family and their mutual acquaintances have turned against him and hold him responsible for his death.
Only then does it dawn on him that by living a toxic lifestyle and associating with nefarious characters, he will be perceived has a toxic and nefarious influence by other people.

The most poignant and seemingly most sorely felt part of his life is his relationship with Axl Rose.
He does not hold back from recounting Axl's unreasonable behaviour, and there are plenty of amusing and bemusing anecdotes about his bizarre actions, but still, throughout it all - and despite the way his former friend and bandmate has so cruelly traduced him of late - he remains emotionally involved and defiantly loyal to him.

The book is almost impossible to put down until the end, as it flows (or stumbles) from one gripping situation to the next.
In this linear account of his life story, one gains insight into several realities: the life of a tearaway teenager in the 70s and 80s; the L.A. rock underwold in general and Guns N' Roses in particular; the prevailance of drug culture in it; and just how small and interconnected the entertainment industry's social circuit really is, and how everyone ends up knowing each other or having just a degree or two of separation between them.

Recommended for those who would like to read a first hand account of a significant part of rock history of the 80s and 90s, even if they have no particular interest in Guns N' Roses or Slash per se.

Summary: Candid account of the life and times of the Guns n' Roses guitarist.